Clojure Development Environment for Excel | Hacker News Reader

Clojure Development Environment for Excel

github.com

78 pointsuaaa11 comments

Also to call various programming (there is no Clojure listed amongst the supported languages, but Java is so it should be easy to build a bridge): http://xlloop.sourceforge.net/

Wow this is actually really cool. Like if I had to work in Excel regularly I'd use this in a heartbeat.

That's awesome. I'm wondering if there's a way to make this work with Excel for OSX. It sounds unlikely but I hope to be surprised.

Here's the same thing with Python for Windows & Mac

http://xlwings.org/

You can share the sheets too as it bundles a runtime

Projects like this are really cool in terms of providing different tools for when you need to work with Excel. However, I don't see tools like this or for any other language being widely adopted.

Here is why:

1 - Most of the times, people are going to use Excel for basic data analysis with the built-in functions.

2 - If you need to do more complex tasks, you have two options:

* You know Clojure, Python or other programming language so you use the default environment for these languages to accomplish the task you need, or

* you know or learn VBA and stick with it because it's already built-in with Excel.

I used to work in the financial industry where lots of things are built in excel, and I have my fair share of VBA programming. What I can tell you is:

1. VBA is aweful. Sure it can communicate well with the spreadsheet, but the language is quite bad, and so is the IDE. You can't write anything complicated. 2. Excel is really good if you want to do some calculations, and it allows you to build something user interface-like really quickly.

So building some models in Excel works fine as long as whatever you want to do is contained in the built-in functions or is not too complicated to be made in VBA, but passed a certain point in complexity, you really want to use another language. Banks have some addins in C++ or C# to export their own functions to excel, and really being able to call a more flexible language like Clojure can simplify life.

What would be really great is the equivalent of the VBA editor for C# and VB.net (there is already one for F#). With roslyn now open source I hope it will dignificantly lower the bar for someone to create it.

In fact Microsoft did create it (VSTA) but then killed it before it could make its way to office. I have no idea of why they think users are better off with VBA, a language that hasn't been updated in 15 years.

Yeah, a revamp of the 'Excel IDE' is long overdue !

I am a software developer, but all the non technical staff, particularly one manager, insist on doing things in excel, despite all the problems it causes. If I can use Clojure to connect to a REST API, that will solve a ton of problems related to data validation. (I don't know if I can do that, but I am going to give it a try).

It can connect to REST apis etc, there's an http client included. I'll update the documentation this weekend into a proper github wiki to make things clearer.

Thanks downer dave

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